Sci Rep. 2026 Jun 18. doi: 10.1038/s41598-026-56941-4. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
Eye Tracking (ET) can help improve understanding of visual attention in computer-supported interactive environments. In attention tasks, distinguishing between relevant target objects and distractors is crucial for effective performance, yet the underlying gaze patterns that drive successful task completion remain incompletely understood. Traditional gaze analyses provide limited insight into the temporal dynamics of attention allocation and the relationship between gaze behavior and task performance. When applied to complex visual search scenarios, current gaze analysis methods face several limitations, including the isolation of measurements in dynamic environments, visual stability, search efficiency, and the task-solving processes involved. This paper proposes an analysis tool, VisiTrail, that considers time-series eye-tracking data on task performance and gaze measures; temporal pattern analysis that reveals how attention evolves throughout task performance; object-click sequence tracking that directly links visual attention to user actions; and performance metrics that quantify both accuracy and efficiency of right actions. The proposed analysis is applied to data collected from the Mushroom Hunter serious game, a multilevel visual search task in which participants identify target mushrooms among distractors of increasing complexity across three difficulty levels. This tool focuses on two scenarios: subject-specific analysis and general analysis across all subjects from which a project collected data from Romania and Portugal. Subject-specific analysis uses only one participant’s data and yields two types of results: a first-level overall analysis that provides detailed insights and a multilevel analysis that compares performance across all three levels, where Level 1 presents the easiest task with few distractors, Level 2 increases difficulty by adding more similar distractors, and Level 3 is the hardest with many closely resembling distractors and more complex layouts. The generalized analysis reveals that gaze stability (Fixation %) was broadly consistent across both cohorts. Romanian participants exhibited faster median reaction times than Portuguese participants; however, given the small sample size (N=7 per cohort), the presence of data-quality anomalies in three Portuguese sessions, and the absence of inferential statistical testing, this difference should be regarded as preliminary and hypothesis-generating rather than conclusive. By using standardized parameters, the results reduce accidental interactions and hardware noise, providing a reliable methodological basis for preliminary analysis and highlighting the need for larger sample sizes to establish statistical validity.
PMID:42315946 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-026-56941-4
